Chapter 6
He was holding a tablet in his hand.
I immediately recognized the posture. The demeanor. The subtle bulge under the left side of his suit jacket.
Intelligence. CIA, or maybe some alphabet agency that didn’t even have an acronym.
Vance had stopped packing my rifle. He stood up slowly, staring at the man in the suit. The other Delta operators shifted uneasily, suddenly acutely aware that they were being watched by someone far above their pay grade.
“Who the hell are you?” Vance demanded, stepping forward. “This is a restricted firing range. You don’t have clearance to be out here.”
The man in the suit didn’t even look at Vance. He kept his eyes locked onto me.
“My name is Director Hayes,” the man said smoothly, his voice carrying effortlessly over the wind. “And I have clearance to be anywhere I damn well please, Master Sergeant.”
Hayes slowly walked forward, closing the distance between us. He moved with a terrifying grace, completely unbothered by the heavily armed men surrounding him.
He stopped a few feet away from me. He looked down at my right hand, which was still trembling violently against my thigh.
Then, he looked up at my face.
“That was a hell of a shot, Jocelyn,” Hayes said softly.
“How long have you been watching?” I asked, my voice tight.
Hayes tapped the screen of his tablet. “Long enough. We had a high-altitude surveillance drone loitering at thirty thousand feet. We watched you arrive. We watched the Master Sergeant mock you. We watched you plug in that… fascinating little toy on your arm.”
He smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “And we watched you vaporize a candle at two thousand, seven hundred and twenty meters.”
My stomach tightened. A cold dread began to pool in my chest.
“The prototype is classified,” I lied smoothly. “You shouldn’t be monitoring this test.”
“Don’t insult my intelligence, Jocelyn,” Hayes sighed. “There is no official test. You built that brace in your garage in Reno. You scrounged the micro-hydraulics from a scrapped medical robotics company. Command didn’t clear this. You called in a favor with an old friend at logistics just to get range time.”
He knew everything.
“What do you want?” I asked, my voice dropping to a dangerous whisper.
Hayes looked around at the Delta operators, who were standing in stunned silence, listening to the exchange.
“I think we need to have a private conversation,” Hayes said.
“I have nothing to say to you,” I replied. “I’m medically retired. I’m a civilian. I’m leaving.”
I turned back toward my truck.
“It’s about a little girl,” Hayes said.
I froze.
The words hit me like a physical blow. The desert wind seemed to stop howling. The world around me instantly faded away.
I slowly turned back around to face him. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth.
“What did you say?” I whispered.
Hayes reached into the inner pocket of his suit jacket. He pulled out a single, high-resolution satellite photograph and held it out toward me.
“Her name is Elara,” Hayes said quietly. “She’s eight years old. She is the daughter of a highly sensitive American asset. Three days ago, she was taken.”
I didn’t take the photo. I just stared at it in his hand. It was a picture of a compound. High concrete walls. Barbed wire. Armed men walking the perimeter.
“Where is she?” I asked, my voice barely audible.
“A mountainous region in Eastern Europe,” Hayes replied. “A fortress. Heavily fortified. Heavily guarded by a private mercenary group.”
“Send them,” I said, pointing my left hand at Vance and the Delta operators. “They are tier-one door kickers. They do hostage rescue in their sleep.”
Hayes shook his head slowly.
“We can’t send an assault team,” Hayes said. “The compound is rigged. The moment the outer perimeter is breached, the moment they hear a helicopter or a breaching charge, the hostage will be executed.”
“Then send a sniper,” I argued, my voice rising in panic. I didn’t want to hear this. I didn’t want to be pulled back into the darkness. “Send one of your active-duty shooters.”
“We tried,” Hayes said grimly. “We modeled the scenario. The only window of opportunity is a tiny ventilation shaft on the southern wall. The target will pass by that shaft for exactly three seconds during a guard rotation.”
He took a step closer to me.
“The distance from the only viable overwatch position to that ventilation shaft is two thousand, six hundred meters,” Hayes said. “The wind shear coming off the mountains is catastrophic.”
He looked down at my violently trembling hand.
“We ran the math through our supercomputers, Jocelyn,” Hayes whispered. “There is not a single unassisted human being on the planet capable of making that shot.”
